[6] She is a staff writer for The Atlantic[7] and a senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
[10] After attending the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Applebaum entered Yale University, where during the Fall 1982 semester she studied Soviet history under Wolfgang Leonhard.
[11] As an undergraduate, she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), an experience she credits with helping shape her opinions.
[12] Applebaum received her BA from Yale in 1986 summa cum laude in history and literature,[13][11] and was the recipient of a two-year Marshall Scholarship at the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987).
[17] In 1994, she published her first book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, a travelogue that described the rise of nationalism across the new states of the former Soviet Union.
[19] She also undertook historical research for her book Gulag: A History (2003) on the Soviet prison camp system, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
[25] From 2011 to 2016, she created and ran the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute, an international think tank and educational charity based in London.
In 2016, she left Legatum because of its stance on Brexit following the appointment of Euroskeptic Philippa Stroud as CEO[35] and joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of Practice at the Institute for Global Affairs.
[48] She was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties".
[56] On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies".
In the conclusion to her book Iron Curtain, Applebaum argued that the reconstruction of civil society was the most important and most difficult challenge for the post-communist states of central Europe; in another essay, she argued that the modern authoritarian obsession with civil society repression dates back to Vladimir Lenin.
[71] In March 2016, eight months before the election of President Donald Trump, Applebaum wrote a Washington Post column asking, "Is this the end of the West as we know it?
[72] Applebaum endorsed Hillary Clinton's campaign for president in July 2016 on the grounds that Trump is "a man who appears bent on destroying the alliances that preserve international peace and American power".
[73] Applebaum's March 2016 Washington Post column prompted the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and the German magazine Der Spiegel to interview her.
[77] In January 2022, Applebaum was invited to testify before the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing entitled "Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism".